You Mad, Bro?

I think one of the things that I’ve been most perplexed and disappointed by since becoming involved in the Occupy movement is seeing how hard some of my fellow citizens are willing to work to avoid, at all costs, agreeing with anything about it.

Some fixate on the physical occupation itself instead of the principles involved and base their objections on that: you’re trespassing, you’re making a mess of the park, you look like a bunch of hippies, etc. While I understand this reaction, to a point anyway, it frustrates me that people would overlook the massive and critical issue of our jeopardized democracy to focus on trivial matters or personal biases — I mean, to me, this is a little like having a fire truck pull up to your blazing house and yelling at the driver for parking on your petunias.

Some clearly don’t get what this is about. Again, I can understand that to a degree, and I feel like its our responsibility as Occupiers to help them understand by repeating the core message as often as possible. I do think that’s been done so widely at this point, however, both locally and nationally, that I’m beginning to wonder if the people who don’t ‘get it’ are still in that category because they simply don’t want to get it. The people who drive by and scream “Get a job!” or who post “I bet you’re writing this on a laptop or smartphone made by some BIG CORPORATION…” clearly have no idea what Occupy is about and are instead objecting to to a nonexistent point, to a stance they’ve simply imagined.

But I’m most puzzled by the anger. You don’t get it, or you don’t like the methods of protest? Fine. OK, maybe we just need to keep talking about these issues and hope that you’ll eventually realize that people with a lot more money than you or I are doing an end-run around the way this system was designed to work, with outcomes that are bad for us as individuals and for our country as a whole. Maybe we’ll never connect and will have to agree to disagree. But there’s a difference between not being on board and being ticked off, and I don’t understand what ordinary citizens would find so anger-producing about fellow Americans exercising their right to speak and assemble as guaranteed by the Constitution.

I have some suspicions. I think some of it comes from our very unfortunate national pastime of assigning a partisan designation to everything — we no longer have ideas, or news, or solutions, we have liberal ideas and right-wing news and socialist solutions. We’re rapidly becoming incapable of discussing anything without first deciding whose ‘side’ is being represented. (That’s a subject for another blog post but I can tell you that, personally, I think this new hyper-partisanship represents the greatest threat to America that I’ve seen in my lifetime.)

I also think some of the strong disagreement is a form of denial, a defense mechanism. It’s what we humans do, whether we’re talking about death or poverty or some other tragic consequence: we try to establish what that person did to bring that outcome upon themselves. Why? Because it reassures us that as long as we don’t do whatever it is they did to end up dead, sick, poor, etc., we’ll be safe. If we admit that strings are being pulled by super-rich people and companies, we admit that we have less control over our destinies than we’d like to believe. As long as homeless people are irresponsible drunks, jobless people are lazy, people with homes in foreclosure are those who tried to live beyond their means, we’re comforted — because we’re none of those things, so we’re going to be just fine. It can’t happen to us.

And then there’s a less attractive but undeniable aspect of human nature that makes us object to someone getting something that (in our opinions) they’re not entitled to, or that we had to work for — the sense that a crowd of demonstrators must want something for themselves, and they want it for free, and it’s either going to cost me money or dammit, it’s just not fair. I think this falls into the ‘not getting it’ category, but I think it’s worth mentioning because it’s also the part of us that politicians exploit when they try to convince us that our country’s problems are caused by illegal immigrants getting social services or public employee pensions and certainly not the trillions of dollars the Fed created to give to the banks whose greed and fraud set the global economy teetering. Getting us all good and riled up at each other is a great way to keep the 99% divided and harmless while the people usurping our democratic power conduct business as usual.

But maybe my suspicions are completely off base, and there are other reasons that perfectly decent working-class people are angry about these protests. If you’re enraged by this whole Occupy thing (and some of the commentary indicates that a number of you are) I’m sincerely interested in hearing what it is that has you so mad. I really want to understand.